Free The Dangerous Kind & Other Stories by Robert Chazz Chute Page B

upset and I went to the hospital chapel and I made myself a prayer. I asked God to take Genie instead of Audrey.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Sure. It didn’t happen to you.”
    “God doesn’t answer prayers, Burt. Even if such a thing as God exists, and I won’t grant you that, he doesn’t interfere with our messed up world. If God cared about you, Audrey wouldn’t get cancer at all—that’s what mature grown-ups call the disease, by the way. Not ‘The Big C’—and there wouldn’t be so much suffering if God didn’t allow such flaws into his designs in the first place.”
    The silence stretched out and, for a moment, Marcus thought the caller had put the receiver down quietly and was stepping back to blow his brains out. That would be awful and shocking. It would also make great radio for his exit from the business.
     
     
     
    Burt took a long drink from his bottle of gin. He drank it straight, no ice. He was serious about getting the job done today and all that healthy orange juice was slowing down the process.
    “I had two daughters,” he said into the phone, sending a message out to the living and the dead, if Genie and Helen were somehow listening. 
    “You have my attention, Burt,” Marcus said. “Lay it on me.”
    “My eldest, Audrey. She got The Big C. Audrey was daddy’s girl. She couldn’t do wrong and nobody loved a daughter like I loved her.” He was breathing heavily. He could hear it through the phone but the more he tried to control it, the worse it got. Lots of things were like that.
    “What happened to…Audrey, was it?”
    “The Big C.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it, Burt.”
    “Are you? I wonder. People find it so goddamn interesting, like they can’t hear enough about it and can’t think enough about it as long as it’s happening to somebody else.”
    “I hear your pain, Burt, but I’m not going to apologize for you tweaking my interest. You called me. Now what’s this about you killing somebody? Were you serious about that or are you just yanking me?”
    “Audrey had the Big C and I…I loved her so much. I had another daughter. Genie. I dream of Genie with the light brown hair. You know that old song?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I do. And I still dream about her. I killed her, or God did.” Burt took another long drag of gin. “Genie was always wild. She was just born that way, like she was meant to be a wolf or something and there was some mistake along the way, like the stork got confused about the delivery.”
    “What happened Burt, between you and me? It’s just us guys and a good chunk of Maine listening.”
     
     
    Burt took a ragged breath, remembering his church-going days. Finally, he said, “I think there’s so much suffering because there’s so much sin everywhere.”
    “Sure, sure,” Marcus said. “We’re all sinners according to religion, which is like blaming us for having two legs and two arms each and commanding us not to have heads. I told you, Burt, we’re all ants in the big plan, only there’s no plan. God doesn’t answer prayers, dude!”
    “God answered my prayer that night.” Burt said. “Genie dropped dead behind the wheel of her car that night at the look off over Poeticule Bay. Aneurysm. She was only nineteen and her brain blew up. She just slumped forward and the car horn went on and on until somebody found her, white and cold.”
    “I really am sorry to hear that, Burt. We all go one by one. We’re all dying, some by feet and others by inches.”
    “That’s a pretty way of talking about something ugly, but let me tell you, right after that, Audrey started to get better. It was like…suddenly she had The Medium C and then The Little C. Then her scans were clear.”
    “You think your deal with God came through and you traded one daughter for another?”
    “I know it. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They just said things like this happen sometimes, as if that was an explanation.”
    “I can tell you, Burt. You’re an